Israel Folau: new documentary charts rise and fall of rugby star four years on

W ith four months until the World Cup, the forces of Australian rugby are uniting. An exciting crop of players were taken into camp last month, fresh coaching staff were unveiled this week, there’s a raft of new sponsors in the wings and the code’s leaders are spruiking and recruiting with cash in the bank. Winning teams are built on such foundations.

Four years ago, it was a very different story. Rugby was a hot mess of explosive headlines and warring factions, within the team and the administration. The code had become a public battlefield of ideologies waged on religious, sexual, financial, legal and social fronts.

In the eye of this hurricane was Israel Folau – rugby star, Christian poster boy and fire-starter.

An NRL prodigy and Australian Rules experiment before becoming a Wallaby wunderkind, Folau was for a decade considered one of the greatest athletes of his generation. But he became the nation’s greatest pariah in 2018-19 when he went public with hardline religious views, offending many with his social media posts claiming gay people were hell-bound.

Folau’s rise and fall is charted in a powerful two-part documentary, called “Folau”, screening on ABC TV this Thursday 18 May and 25 May. Featuring revealing interviews with Folau’s coaches, teammates, spiritual and legal advisers, it is not a sports documentary. Rather it tells a strange and tragic tale of how a high-profile sportsman made himself into a political and religious football.

“Ultimately it’s a very sad story,” director Nel Minchin admits. “It cost [former Rugby Australia CEO] Raelene Castle and [ex-national coach] Michael Cheika their jobs, derailed the Wallabies’ 2019 World Cup campaign, cost millions of dollars in legal fees and bad press, and